POSTED: March 25th 2009
NewsUpdate
WADA upset by FIFA tantrum
KEIR RADNEDGE / Sports Features Communications
DENVER: World anti-doping leaders have responded more sharply to the latest volley of complaints from world football over the ‘whereabouts’ regulations.
The new code introduced by the World Anti-Doping Agency insists that leading sportsmen and women should provide location information between 6am and 11pm seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Last week FIFA’s executive committee and president Sepp Blatter said that, in effect, they did not believe the daily reporting updates should apply to leading players both during the season and particularly not during holidays.
Then FIFA and European federation UEFA issued a rare joint communiqué reiterating their resistance.
However David Howman, WADA’s general secretary, said in Denver – where he had been attending Sportaccord – that he found it a “little distressing” that the football authorities had spoken up so soon.
Longer wait
He believed WADA and major team sports, whose concerns he acknowleged, had agreed to wait between six month and a year before examining the effects and possible hitches of the changes.
Howman had addressed the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) on Tuesday and had noted that “there were several team sports there and they never raised the issue.”
He added: “What FIFA and UEFA are saying is an attack on the system of quite some significance and if it continues we would have to report it to our board.”
The ultimate sanction for non-compliance with the WADA code would be expulsion from the Olympic Games but this remains unthinkable as far as football, the world’s biggest sport is concerned. The more certain outlook is that lawyers on behalf of both sides will, as in the past, haggle persistently through the issue, point by point, in search of compromising words.
Keywords · WADA · FIFA · UEFA · Sportaccord · Howman
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